Home Brewing | Equipment | Making the Wort Chiller

After boiling the wort with the hops the wort needs to be cooled to blood temperature so the yeast can be added. With around 30L of wort this can take a while, and during this time bacteria can get in and bad things can happen.To speed up the process, a wort chiller is used to rapidly cool the wort down so the yeast can be pitched sooner and fermentation can start. There are generally two kinds of chiller - immersion chillers (ICs) and counterflow chillers (CFs). Immersion chillers generally sit in the wort and have water running through them. Counterflow chillers have wort running through them and cold water running around the path the wort takes. I made a simple immersion chiller out of a 10 metre length of 10mm copper pipe.

Materials Used

1 x 10 metre length of 10mm copper pipe

2 x 10mm to 15mm pipe adaptors

2 x lengths of garden hose

2 x hose clips

Tools Used

A former - in my case a carpet tube - people have used paint cans

A blow torch

Solder Flux

Boiling water

Screwdriver

A rolling pin (optional)

Method

Get the former and start bending the copper pipe around it, leaving about a metre of pipe at each end to make the inlet / outlet sections from. Try to keep the coils as tight to the former as you can make them.

When the coil is complete, bend the inlet and outlet pipes so they go up alongside the coil and then fashion a sort of U-bend at the top - apparently using a rolling pin as a former works well - so you can hang the wort chiller on the side of the boiler.

I didn't use a rolling pin and so I guess I'll be holding my wort chiller for the duration it takes to cool the wort down :| Finally, solder on the 10mm to 15mm adapters, heat the end of the hose up in boiling water and push each length onto the end of the adapters, securing each with a hose clip.